Beyond The Sea
by Idatathme
Summary: AU Ryan and Fontaine are still at war. Rapture is still in turmoil. But what if Atlas was real? Could he, along with a new aquaintance, put an end to the fight for the city? First fic. OC story! Possible Atlas/OC towards the end! M for violence etc.


I could hear water.

Everywhere.

All around me, running water.

I couldn't see a thing, but I knew something had to be wrong. Even here in Rapture, rooms don't just leak spontaneously. Or so I'd thought. I tried opening my eyes, but all I saw was darkness. I took a half-dead hand and reached up to my face to see if I had a cover over them or something, but there was nothing. They were open and unbound. Either the room was pitch black, or I was blind. I decided to try saving my sanity and pray it was the former.

I could tell the situation was getting worse by the second. The noise the water was making told me that it wasn't actually leaving the room and, in the last few minutes I'd wasted trying to find my eyesight, it was rising swiftly. By the sound of things, I had just under four, maybe 5 minutes tops before things got life threatening. I made a move to sit upright, but my body wouldn't listen to my brain. I could barely feel anything below my neck. That realisation alone threw a cold stab of urgency through my mind. I had no idea where I was, what was going on, or if I was even going to get out of there alive.

I began franticly urging my limbs to move, shaking my muscles violently trying to gain a response. The rattling noise that was coming from beneath me told me I was on some sort of metal gurney. That basically narrowed it down to one of three places: I was either in one of Steinman's wards, one of the surrounding medical facilities, or the morgue. Whilst I tried mapping out my surroundings, I could slowly feel myself regaining power over my body. I brought my arms up from my side to aid myself in sitting up, by as soon as my head lifted it met cold, hard steel. I let out a pained groan and lay back down. My arms crawled the wall space in search for answers as to where I was. They could barely move before they hit side or ceiling with a metallic pang. That's when it hit me.

I was in the morgue after all.

In one of the closed cold chambers, to be exact. Only, one of the gurneys had been taken out from underneath mine, and I had been placed on the top shelf so that I was spaced from the ground. I kicked a cautionary foot out and heard the clanging noise I'd hoped for. The hinges on the door had been weakened by the strong water flow, which I could feel building under me. The freezing Atlantic sea was playing around my fingertips as I dangled them through a gap in the metal beneath. I vaguely remembered McDonagh talking me through Rapture's pipe systems a while back when I offered to help him repair a broken main. Ryan wanted the place looking neat, so he asked for the waterworks to be kept out of sight. That meant putting them through the backs of the walls in a few dodgy places, some running through the back of the Morgue's body storage. One of the pipes must have frozen and burst.

Trying to take into account where about the weak points on the door were, I started to pound it with my strongest leg, putting as much force behind the strikes as possible. The water was lapping around my cheeks now, threatening to spill over into my eyes. The cold started gnawing at my skin, wearing away at my determination. The depth made kicking the door harder, as the speed my foot could move through the water was slowing. I refused to give up, and deepened my breathing. Keeping as calm as I could, I continued to try and escape. If I didn't open this cooler in little under a minute, I'd be lost forever. Closing my eyes as they were taken over by the seawater, I took one last, full breath and summoned all my strength. With a final, heartfelt kick, the hinges buckled and the door flew open.

The next few seconds were a blur as I was thrown out of my would-be coffin and onto the floor with unbelievable force, followed by gallons of water spilling out after me and carrying me across the tiled floor. I knelt there, a drenched, cold, and disorientated mess as the harsh light burnt deep into my unfamiliar eyes. The trauma of those last few minutes caught up with me, and I broke down sobbing miserably into my pruned hands. Who the hell had decided to put me in that death trap? If it was some kind of practical joke then someone had some serious explaining to do. But besides that, I still had to wonder why anyone hadn't heard me struggling. I mean sure, I hadn't screamed out or anything but the racket I'd been making kicking the door in should have been enough to alarm someone. Didn't they have medical staff monitoring the place? Then again, it looked as if I was at the very back end of the facility, maybe it was too far for the noise to carry? It was the morgue after all. It's not likely anyone would hear banging and expect it to be a live person. People are dead when they are transferred there. Dead. Gone. But then, by the same token, how could I have been admitted? Feeling dizzy from thought, I shakily got to my feet and started to stumble up to the main desk. I didn't get too far however, as I turned the first corner and felt bile quickly reach the back of my throat.

Blood.

Lots of it. All over the walls, the floor, the ceiling. The hallway was covered in the awful stuff. A body was pinned to a chair by many surgical instruments. Scissors were jutting out from her eye sockets. Her skin was peeled back in places and a bone-saw was buried in her ribcage. Her jaw was unhinged and her tongue was crudely stuck to her left cheek with masking tape. Other such horrors were dotted around the walkway, and I refused to believe they existed. I lurched backwards onto a pillar and jolted my head downwards as I sent what little I had in my stomach sprawling across the tiles below. Coughing and wiping remnants of vomit from the corner of my lips, I couldn't bring myself to face the sickening display that was ahead. Who could have done such a thing? Was she dead while she was experimented on in such a lewd fashion? Or was that poor woman alive when she was being carved so intricately? I didn't want to think about it. I couldn't. The utter nature of it chilled me to my very core. Hell, nature? There was nothing natural about it. I knew I had to get out of there, and the only way was through the human wreckage.

Casting my gaze to the floor, I made a brave effort to edge past them quickly and calmly, but my fear over weighed my will and I let out a cry of fright as I dashed past them clumsily. I didn't know where I was going and I didn't care. For all I knew the son of a bitch who did it all could have still been right around the corner, but I disregarded that fact and kept running. I did so for about 5 minutes, out of the morgue, out of the medical centre, just running until I inevitably tripped over an exposed wire and landed face first, biting down hard on my bottom lip as I went. I immediately looked up and around to see if anyone had noticed me, but it soon registered that the entire place was deserted. Not a single living soul was to be seen. I let out a short cry of exasperation, and drove my fists into the floor as warm tears began to glide their way down my cheeks and into the small puddle of blood that was forming as a result of my split lip. I needed to find a safe place to hide until I could figure out what was going on. It seemed like Rapture had taken a turn for the worse, and I didn't want to experience it first hand, without at least knowing something of what had evidently gone wrong.


End file.
